I WAS a young fellow at the time, and I had been living a racketty life for some six months on the Continent. With no one to check me in my folly, a full purse, and an indulgent mother at home in England who was continually advising me in her letter to see the world before I returned to settle down on my estate. What wonder that I plunged into the wildest dissipation. I drank, I gambled, and surrounded by company of the most doubtful kind I ran fast down the road to ruin. When one afternoon I strolled into a picture gallery in a quaint old town on the Rhine. My attention was at once arrested by three remarkable pictures.
THE FIRST PICTURE.
The first depicted a young man dressed in the fashion of the day sauntering leisurely along but with his eyes fixed on a hand that beckoned him to follow. The careless gaiety which was expressed in his face, and the pleasure with which he seemed to be obeying the call was depicted by a masterly hand. Flowers bloomed in his path, and bright sunshine seemed to beam all around him.
THE SECOND PICTURE.
The second picture was of a more sombre line. Again, the young man stands out as the centre figure, but his face is weary and downcast, trouble and anxiety is stamped upon his brow, and he is looking back irresolutely, as if wishing to retrace his steps. A slender cord is cast around him which the same hand as before is slowly but surely drawing along. He seems to feel its pressure and to be hesitating whether he will break it and escape, but the energy and strength before depicted in his figure seems to be deserting him, and apparently he is being led along with little or no resistance on his part. Black ominous clouds overhead are rolling up, the flowers are withering at his feet, and as I looked I gave an involuntary sigh of pity, before I turned to the third and last picture to learn his unhappy fate.
THE THIRD PICTURE.
Here he is again but the scene is so intensely painful and so lifelike in its depiction, that I shuddered as I looked! On the brink of a most awful precipice he stands, the horror of ruin stares him in the face. All the languor and vacillation of purpose has vanished now; he is struggling with all the strength of a man fighting for dear life, his head and shoulders thrown back, his heels planted firmly on a tuft of grass perilously near the edge and his hands attempting in vain to loosen the hold of a massive chain which binds him firmly in its grip. Below is depicted in all his satanic joy at a soul’s destruction the Evil One himself. In both hands he is holding the end of the chain which he appears to be dragging with the greatest ease and complacency.
I felt as I looked that escape was impossible and that the young man with his haggard and despairing face and bloodshot eyes was now realising the awfulness of his doom. “What a fool to let himself be conquered,” I muttered, “if only he had broken away before.” And then my own course of folly flashed across me, and I saw as I had never seen before that I was being led by an invisible hand to my destruction.
And now, friend, a word or two to you from one who has sinned and suffered, but through the help of God has escaped from the Devil’s power before it was too late.
Think over these Three Pictures and ask yourself the question : Where am I standing now? am I being enticed? or am I being drawn? or am I being dragged? And if you are led as I was to real anxiety about your fate, go straight in your helplessness to the only One that can free you, and He who is willing and is able to subdue all things unto Himself will deliver you and save you from the awful fate which the artist so feebly tried to depict in his last picture.